Breaking

The Surprisingly Long History of the Fiscal Cliff

Linguaphiles have been assiduously tracking the phrase’s origin -- in particular, whether there is some earlier root than Ben S. Bernanke’s use of it in February to describe the scheduled combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Photographer: Chris Rank/Bloomberg

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- While “fiscal cliff” negotiations
may produce high drama for journalists and partisans as well as
desperate uncertainty from Main Street to Wall Street, they are
an absolute gold mine for wordsmiths.

Linguaphiles have been assiduously tracking the phrase’s
origin -- in particular, whether there is some earlier root than
Ben S. Bernanke’s use of it in February to describe the
scheduled combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

The New Republic recently published an article mistakenly
crediting the phrase to the author of a 1989 story in the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch about a special higher-education tax. Other
observers have pointed to this passage in a 1975 Dallas Morning
News op-ed article by columnist Mike Kingston: “Who hasn’t
looked with horror at New York City’s financial plight? The
nation’s biggest, richest city is about to go over the fiscal
cliff if the state and federal governments don’t lend a helping
hand.”

But the formulation is quite a bit older. Understanding how
the metaphor has been used throughout history, as well as
examining a few literary antecedents, can shed light on our
current mess, and help us appreciate that our situation is not
unique.

Ben Zimmer, who writes the language column for the Boston
Globe and dug up the Kingston essay, has pointed to a 1957 use
of “fiscal cliff,” in a slightly different context, from the New
York Times. But what was new in the 1950s was only the addition
of the word “fiscal.” The use of the word “cliff,” modified by
an adjective, has long been a metaphor for economic distress.

Precipitous Precedents

For example, a 1948 article in the magazine America warned
of the nation’s growing infatuation with automobiles: “Monthly
payments plus high maintenance costs on a car keep many a family
on the edge of a financial cliff, so that they cannot afford
children, housing, insurance, medical care and other items that
would contribute to a really sound home life.”

The Saturday Evening Post, in 1953, had this to say about
the early Disney studio: “But ownership had its pitfalls, too,
and in the decade 1928-38 they skidded intermittently toward the
edge of the financial cliff.”

A 1934 essay in the magazine Forum, discussing the future
of the New Deal, said: “Neither will it be necessary for our
nation to plunge over the edge of an economic cliff in an orgy
of price-cutting, sweatshop-opening, wage-slashing, and market-swamping.”

We can go back further. Zimmer noted an 1893 editorial in
the Chicago Tribune: “The free silver shriekers are striving to
tumble the United States over the same fiscal precipice.”

Once we follow Zimmer’s invitation to play more freely with
the second word of the phrase, a whole landscape of metaphor
opens before us. Thus, for example, we find in a 1912 issue of
the journal Current Opinion a quote from a Springfield,
Massachusetts, newspaper: “It has been found that a government
by Socialists in an American city does not necessarily land the
community on the brink of a social and economic precipice.”

An 1889 article in the American Review warned the board of
an American missionary society not to let the organization “slip
blindly too near the edge of a financial precipice.” And a
British newspaper commented, all the way back in 1866, that
“Bombay still hovers on the brink of the financial precipice.”

In short, we can safely say that the image of finances
hanging at the edge of a cliff or precipice or escarpment goes
back a long way. We can’t even say that the metaphor has been
recently rediscovered.

It has been with us always because problems of finance have
been with us always. That we find Bernanke’s February usage the
least bit interesting is a sign merely of our loss of interest
in our own language.

Metaphorical Messages

There is a larger lesson. The metaphor of a cliff, with all
of its dangers, is well known to literature, as is its solution.
Let’s consider two examples.

The writer Catherine George Ward Mason, in her 1823 novel,
“The Cottage on the Cliff,” described the cottage in words that
might apply to our current bipartisan budget mess: “I have let
it tumble to pieces, inch by inch, this many a long year, for
the devil himself could not find a hole to put his nose in, when
the weather is stormy.”

The cliff for Ward Mason is a metaphor for life: We perch
precariously, things never quite the way we want them to be.
When the storm strikes, we are almost never prepared. The
difference between her story and our current situation is that
when Ward Mason’s hero, Captain Singleton, buys the cottage for
his family, he is more interested in getting the house in order
than in placing blame for the mess.

Then there is John Milton’s use in “Paradise Lost.” He
described the eagles and storks, who “On Cliffs and Cedar tops
thir Eyries build.” How do they manage this miracle? “In common,
rang’d in figure wedge thir way / Intelligent of seasons, and
set forth / Their Aierie Caravan high over Sea’s / Flying, and
over Lands with mutual wing.”

The key word is “mutual.” The cliff-dwelling birds of
Milton’s tale fly “in common” because they know that
cooperation, not competition, is the key to their survival. A
cliff may be high and scary, but it can provide a safe and
comfortable home as long as those who dwell there are concerned
less with victory than with common interest.

Possibly we have traveled too far down the partisan path to
imitate Milton’s eagles and storks. Perhaps cooperation on long-term solutions is beyond us. Let’s hope not. Otherwise we can
safely predict that half a century hence, when the final faint
echoes of our passionate arguments have faded into history, a
new generation will face its own financial escarpment.

Perhaps its lexicographers, researching the etymology of
their own budgetary precipice, will stumble upon the vertiginous
metaphors of the present day, never dreaming that their
financial mess is our fault.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and his
most recent novel is “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.”)